XRP Holds Firm as Lending Vote Opens, Batch Upgrade Slips to October 9

XRP trades near $1.50 as validators vote on a lending protocol, CSD BR adopts the XRP Ledger, and a Nasdaq listing via Evernorth moves ahead.

XRP is changing hands at $1.49 to $1.50, and the token's steady tone owes as much to a busy protocol calendar as it does to the broader market. With a fresh validator vote now live and a second upgrade pushed back, the network's technical roadmap has become the main driver of attention.

A Lending Protocol Heads to Validators

RippleX, the development arm behind the ledger, opened voting on Thursday for a significant network change known as LendingProtocolV1_1. Validators are now weighing new mechanisms designed to bring fixed-term, fixed-rate loans directly onto the ledger.

The proposal builds on earlier templates by adding closed vaults — structures with defined phases for subscription, investment and eventual repayment. One notable wrinkle concerns how interest is handled: under the rules, loan interest is only recorded in the accounts once the actual payment flow occurs.

Activation on the mainnet is anything but immediate. The credit system requires the simultaneous approval of three interdependent specifications, each backed by a sustained majority of more than 80 percent of validators. That threshold must hold continuously for two weeks before the features go live.

Brazil Ties Deepen, and a Nasdaq Vehicle Takes Shape

The lending push fits a wider effort to open the ledger to professional players. Ripple President Monica Long said this week at an industry conference in Seoul that future volumes of tokenized assets are likely to settle predominantly on public blockchains.

Concrete evidence of that thesis arrived Tuesday from South America. Brazilian financial market infrastructure provider CSD BR announced a partnership with Ripple to use the XRP Ledger as a supplementary layer for recording and verifying financial assets. The operational rollout is set to cover shares in investment funds from Brazilian bank BTG Pactual, while official registration, custody and settlement functions remain entirely within CSD BR's existing systems. Even so, the arrangement marks a prestigious deployment in traditional securities territory, plugging distributed ledger technology directly into established financial processes.

Corporate developments have added their own momentum. Shareholders of the shell company Armada Acquisition Corp. II reportedly approved a planned merger with Ripple-backed Evernorth, a deal intended to bring a listing on the US tech exchange Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN. The future company plans to hold substantial XRP reserves as its central asset, though regulatory conditions still need to be met before trading can begin. No official confirmation from regulatory filings or the companies involved had surfaced at the time of the vote, yet market observers read the reports as a supportive factor for the token.

Institutional products have drawn steady interest as well. During the trading week of September 21 to 25, US spot XRP ETFs reportedly logged net inflows totaling $75.6 million.

Upgrade Schedule Shifts

Alongside the market events, the network's technical infrastructure is working through several changes. On September 25, RippleX released version 3.4.1 of xrpld as an emergency update to address security-related protocol issues and prepare adjustments for future feature expansions.

Two functional extensions are in the pipeline. The "PermissionDelegationV1_1" feature would let accounts delegate limited tasks without granting full signing rights. Confidential transfers to protect sensitive transaction data and delegated account permissions are also on the agenda for the current month.

The bundling feature "BatchV1_1," which would process up to eight transactions together, has slipped. According to media reports, the approval rate fell below the required threshold, restarting the activation countdown. The earliest date for this extension is now October 9.

Chart Picture

On the technical front, XRP is holding above key trend lines despite a subdued daily performance. The current price sits above the 50-day moving average of $1.37. The token is also trading above its 200-day average of $1.28, having gained 0.7 percent on the day. With upgrade dates on the calendar and institutional integration advancing, market participants have a packed stretch ahead.